So maybe the Japanese nuclear power plant technology really ISN'T the "ne plus ultra." Would Fred Upton know -- or care?

The energy chickens come home to roost: If there were a life form less suitable than Michigan Rep. Fred Upton to chair the House Energy Committee . . . well, you can be sure the Republicans would have found it. Luckily for them, they didn't have to look. Chairman Fred isn't just an energy-illiterate imbecile; he's an energy-industry crack whore.

by Ken

Since the question the other day I echoed the question "If the Japanese can’t build a safe reactor, who can?" from Anne Applebaum's WaPo column of the same name, I want to introduce some contradictory testimony, which suggests that our esteem for Japanese technological fastidiousness is substantially overdone.

On the contrary, says Ian Welsh, whom I'm strongly inclined to trust in these and most other matters. Earlier this week, in a post called "No Free Lunch," Ian Wrote:

[T]he reactors in question were not properly built and tested. It is very clear now that the Japanese nuclear industry, as with the American, has been cutting corners to save money. Let this be a warning, there is no free lunch. If you skimp on such features, it will inevitably come back to haunt you. If you want to stop this sort of thing, start sending executives to jail for negligent homicide, otherwise expect it to continue.

Nor is Japan's earthquake preparedness necessarily as compulsive as I've assumed:

Japan poured a pile of concrete in the last couple decades, including in the last 2 years. They could have poured concrete over the backup generators in plants like this, instead of making roads to nowhere, but they didn’t. Japan’s technocrats are, fundamentally, incompetent. Perhaps not as incompetent as America’s, but in the same general boat, as are all the developed world’s technocrats.

Ian points out further that a less-nuclear-dependent Japan is not a pleasant option:

Contrary to what many on the left think, widescale solar is still not feasible, the production of large solar panels produces huge amounts of toxic byproducts. So if Japan wants to go off nukes, they would most likely go off them to coal, and if you replace all those nukes with that much coal, it’s a complete environmental and health disaster, and a massive downshift in standard of living, to boot.

And in the more general matter of our short-term power needs:

The choice is being made, today, to deny, deny, deny reality. The reality is that the energy bottleneck has to be dealt with. And the reality is that the only technology ready right now, which can be scaled, which could tide us over the 20 years we need, is probably nuclear.

Obviously we remain in urgent need of serious discussion, with a view to desperately need sensible and immediate action on a radical change in the way we meet our energy needs. And that discussion needs to be based on the best information available about such options as we have.

So do we rush to embrace the nuclear option? Not so fast, says Ian.

the plants we have were designed not as civilian plants, but as dual use plants able to produce material for nuclear weapons. They were deliberately designed to not be particularly safe and even the safety features they theoretically have, as with the Gulf disaster, have had corners cut so severely that they aren’t safe.

Nuclear power might be relatively safe, but not built by us, not by this society. But the other options are disastrous as well. As a practical matter, we are going to be moving more and move to coal, shale oil and tar sands oil. And that economy is ugly as hell, and an environmental disaster.

As if that doesn't sound hopeless enough, I hope you have excess hopelessness capacity available, because we have to consider just who's sitting at our energy-policy table.

Remember Fred Upton? You know, the new crack-whore chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee? The energy-industry whore who's trying to eliminate the EPA, whom Howie described recently as one of "the worst energy company shills in Congress." Whom Noah wrote about at the time he edge out the even crazier -- though no more corrupt -- John Shimkus and Joe Barton for the Energy Committee chairmanship, pointing out that he only seemed more reasonable by comparison with those authentically certifiable whackjobs. In his new position of authority, Fred has been running around like a corporate crack whore without a head blithering that we need to be eliminating spending to find alternative energy sources and focus on domestic oil production, the absolute wrongest answers that could possibly come out of a human brain.

Really, for a trifecta of ignorance, corruption, and garden-variety insanity (and I'm not speaking hyperbolically -- the man should be in a straitjacket in the dungeon of a loony bin somewhere, or preferably the psych ward of a maximum-security prison), you couldn't do better.

If increased domestic oil production were a reasonable option, why wouldn't Fred's corporate whoremasters be devoting some of those beyond-human-imagining windfall profits of recent years to it? And while he's quite right that there is no currently available replacement for existing power-generating technologies, how stupid do you have to be to propose cutting funding for energy research?

And how stupid do you have to be to ignore, as all Republicans do, the things we should have been doing for decades to rescale our energy needs? But of course Republicans who interest themselves in energy matters are so fraught with blatant conflicts of interest that they should be indicted for even opening their mouths on the subject, since they're simply paid mouthpieces for the industry.

Of course "Big Dick" Cheney should be in prison now, serving out whatever time remains on the planet he's struggled so hard -- for both partisan and personal profit -- to befoul. As we keep pointing out, when you let these people run roughshod over the law, not to mention over simple human decency, they only become more brazen.

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